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Beyonce Baby Birth Rumors Spark Internet Frenzy

The Twitterverse is exploding with chatter that the "Single Ladies" singer has welcomed her first child with husband Jay-Z.

Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic/Getty Images

December 30, 2011

by

Erin Carlson

Fans' breathless anticipation of the arrival of Beyonce and Jay-Z's firstborn is rising to a fever pitch on the web, with buzz building that the music powerhouse couple are the new parents of a baby girl.

Chatter is growing on Twitter that Beyonce has given birth to a girl the duo named Tiana-May Carter, giving her the true moniker of Jay-Z, aka Shawn Carter.

According to blaring and entirely dubious headlines on the gossip website Media Take Out (via Gawker), Beyonce was scheduled to go into labor in New York City on Wednesday, reserving St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital's "luxury labor and delivery floor" for the occasion. The site said it had confirmation from a pair of nurses at the hospital, but they've been wrong before: In 2010, Media Take Out set off false Beyonce pregnancy alarms and, this year, it cited a source as claiming that the singer had been wearing a prosthetic baby belly. (Beyonce was forced to deny the rampant faux bump allegations.)

Instead of putting out a press statement, the "Single Ladies" singer announced her baby news in August on the red carpet at the MTV Video Music Awards, holding her belly in a very public act of confirmation. Twitter users went wild: Beyonce became a worldwide trending topic on the micro-blogging site, eliciting a record-breaking 8,868 tweets per second following the announcement. Users brainstormed possible names for her child, such as Babyonce, which is a clever spinoff of Beyonce but not quite as nice as "Tiana-May."

"Honestly, I just felt free," she said of her pregnancy reveal in an ABC interview with Katie Couric earlier this month. "I really did, because I'd been holding the most exciting thing in for so long, and I just felt like, 'Wow, now I can enjoy and now I can just experience this the way that every woman should,' " she said. "I felt like, 'Oh, I can breathe and be happy. It was a beautiful feeling. ... I went straight off the stage and cried. I hugged my mom, I hugged Jay and just cried. It was a beautiful day."

THR reached out to representatives for Beyonce and Jay-Z, but they didn't immediately respond to requests for comment.